Category: Short Fiction

Editor’s Note: You may have noticed I recently added a Verse section to Stranger Than Truth. One of the main reasons for this was to highlight awesome pieces of rhythmic fiction by Tasty Yumyum like this one about a great musical triumph.

I got an email earlier today from our benevolent dictator of an editor, asking for more copy on this blog to keep giving our readers fresh content. I’m not prepared to put up my next addition to my NaNoWriMo novel yet, but I do have something from my own blog that I’d like to share over here.

This was the first story I ever posted, and it was quickly buried in my backlog where no one ever read it. I always felt it deserved a wider audience. It may be fiction: I cannot say that this actually happened, but I suspect strongly it did. For a couple of summers I worked in a factory that cooked steel, and I heard this from a co-worker of mine who rarely spoke at great length, and never demonstrated having enough imagination to come up with this out of the blue.

Whatever truth there is to it, I’m sure I have embroidering the tale some, but that is the prerogative of a storyteller. It’s my story now, and I’ll tell it to you just as I would across a table, over a beer, in the back of my local watering hole.

This is the story of a party, a great party, and that party’s ending makes it one for the ages.

This past weekend I found myself eager to get started, even though NaNoWriMo hadn’t begun. Then I realized it might be a good idea to warm up a little anyway, so I set out to write a short story.

When the concept for Artistic Differences came to me, I knew I had to see it through—but I also knew it was in danger of becoming cheesy and gimmicky. I tried with all my writer’s might to stop this from happening, and I’m fairly sure I succeeded.

It was a good exercise because it alerted me to a habit I need to break during NaNoWriMo: labouring over every piece of prose. Read on and enjoy!

Editor’s Note: Tasty has a way with the rhyming epic—here’s another lyrical tesserac that Yumyum himself describes “a Seussian exercise in cadence.” Read on and enjoy the ballad of Motorcycle Marley. It’s an uplifting story of passion, determination and thoroughly popped wheelies.Continue reading “Motorcycle Marley”

This is a story I wrote in college (and have revised since), and it is the first appearance of the name Marcus Carab. Here Marcus Carab is the name of a character, though I have since adopted it as a pen name for no good reason. It is inspired by a famous thought experiment—I suspect you can guess which one. Enjoy!

Editors Note: I just found this mystifying and super-fresh ballad by Tasty Yumyum in the post queue. It took me a couple reads to get the words to fit into my brain—I suggest you do the same. Read on and enjoy Salamander Dunderhead

I remember writing this in a single enthusiastic sitting. It came very easily to me. At the time I was working at a Call Centre for Sprint Canada, so the cubicled workplace was more than a theoretical setting for me. I had also just seen Office Space, so I tried to incorporate what I liked about that into my scene. One of my favourite television shows at the time was the old Brit-Com Yes, Minister, so I adapted a line from that too.

It hasn’t aged as well as my other short play, The Artists’ Farce: The passage of time has left Bill Gates and floppy disks behind, but I guess if you keep in mind it was written in the late 90s it works as well now as it did then. A couple of friends and I acted it out in a drama class later that year, and I remember one of my classmates really threw himself into the gag of falling off his stool… We had a lot of fun with it. Anyway, here it is:

I took OAC Writer’s Craft in my last year of high school, and I loved it. A lot of students took the course looking to boost their grade point average, but most of them ran into difficulty producing a coherent and entertaining plot under a tight deadline. I had been writing short stories and a couple of aborted novels for a number of years at that point, so I was pretty good at thinking up something quick and getting it all down in one long rush of pen and paper. Looking back through my notebooks now, most of my work hasn’t aged very well, but there are a couple of things I did then that I still rather enjoy.

The following one-scene play (I guess it could be called a skit…) is something I remember being quite proud of at the time, so I dug it out of a box the last time I visited my parents, and I’ve given it a quick coat of polish to make it blog worthy. It’s a farce between two pretentious artists orbiting around a very fragile, very valuable sculpture. My teacher loved it: In addition to writing, he also taught music, drama, and directed the school musical every year, so big egos from not-so-big talents were familiar territory for him. This play took his fancy to such an extent that we acted it out for the class the next day. Maybe it was the fact that this saved everyone five or ten minutes of actual school work, but it seemed to be well received. Anyway, here’s the play: